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Cordon Bleu Auto Slow Cooker

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Able to coos all day without supervision. Uses no more power than a light bulb. Features include an auto setting for perfect temperature control, an elegant removable crockpot which allows easy serving and cleaning - lifts directly to table (its oven, fre „

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This crock pot rocks! Beware cheap, gleaming imitations.

This is the one! Buy it.

GENERAL THINGS TO LOOK FOR IN A SLOW COOKER - I've had 5 slow cookers, (I keep breaking things :( ) and I would suggest that the things to look for are:1 A 'round' cooker. This helps distribute the heat evenly (and this is essential). I have had a couple of 'oval' cookers and the heat burns the food in the 'corners'.2 Thick ceramic. Again, this helps distribute heat evenly (and again, this is essential). Unfortunately, you cannot tell the ceramic thickness without looking at the item itself. For this reason, I advise against buying online. Go to the store and have a good look.3 Nicely spaced heater element (again, to ensure even heat distribution). I don't know why I mentioned this, cos you can't tell without dismantling the item :(

THIS MODEL. I recommend this cooker! It is round and is made of thick ceramic and distributes heat perfectly.It doesnt look good ( I wanted a gleaming, stainless steel item to match my toaster, kettle etc.). It looks 'plasticy', and although it is 'cool wall', the outer plastic surface can melt if placed close to hot items - my George Foreman grill was close-by and melted the outer wall of the slow cooker a bit.

But if its performance you want - then this is IT! Put your food in it. turn it on, go to work, come back home after work, and eat the food. How easy can it be?

Sadly, I threw my old one away because I dropped, and smashed, the glass lid. Spare parts are difficult (read - impossible) to come by. Its cheaper to replace the entire slow cooker.

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I have had my slow cooker for some time now and to be quite honest I have never regretted the purchase once. I can't remember how much I paid for it, but I have looked around and they're somewhere in the region of £25 these days. For those of you who don't know the slow cooker only uses about the same amount of electricity as a standard light bulb (i.e. not a lot) and cooks food slowly during the whole day. Some designs consist of a crock cooking pot, which heats up when it is connected to the electrical supply. This one features a crock-pot that sits inside a metal outer casing, which gets hot when connected and thus the food is cooked. Both designs work equally well. Where the cooking pot is separate from the outer casing this can then be removed for ease of serving and subsequently ease of cleaning, but having said that this type of cooking doesn't really create any difficult washing up as the heat isn't high enough to burn the food, especially with this product as it has a temperature control! I say it like that as a lot of them don't have temperature controls, and with the type of cooking that this is, they aren't really needed to be honest. The sorts of foods that can be cooked in a slow cooker and many and varied from meat, fish and vegetables to fruit and even some types of cakes, although I have to admit I have never tried cooking cakes - I think I'll stick to using the oven thank you! The instruction book that came with the slow cooker gives a few recipes but the best thing to do is to get a decent cookery book written especially for slow cookers if you feel like experimenting. This will give you the basic information of what cooks best in your slow cooker and then it's up to you! Let your imagination run wild! I have always said that you never get the same meal twice from my slow cooker because I tend to throw in whatever vegetables I have at the time a nd make it up as I go along! You can use fresh, tinned or frozen foods as the length of cooking time will make sure that any food is completely cooked by the time you come to eat it. I have found that the very best things to cook are stews, braised steak and chicken chasseur - not all at once you understand! I tend to use my slow cooker when I know that I will be late home from work. In the morning before I go out I load the slow cooker with meat and vegetables and any appropriate sauces and leave it to cook whilst I'm out. I know it may sound like a chore to do first things in the morning, but if you prepare most of the ingredients the night before it doesn't take much time at all. One word of caution you must not leave the ingredients in the cold slow cooker overnight. Prepare them the night before but keep them in the fridge until the following morning. Then you can just throw them all into the cooker, switch on, give it all a stir and leave it alone until teatime. (Or dinner time if you're posh!) The best thing is that when I return home after a day at work a most glorious smell greets me as I open the front door and the meal is already cooked for me. This means that if I am tired I can have a meal ready to eat and I won't be tempted to have a quick, high calorie snack instead. The great advantage is that you can use the cheapest cuts of meat as the long, slow cooking period tenderises the meat. All in all it saves money on the fuel costs and the shopping costs, and saves time too. It will be great when we move to the seaside as well. We'll be able to go out for the day and come back to a ready cooked meal at night.